Her husband, Uncle Emery, looked at her with no tenderness, and snarled, “Very kind of you to allow me to define my own racial status! Well, Neil says that his mother, his own mother, is a coon, but it just happens that she is also my sister, and let me tell you right here and now that she is no nigger, or me either, and if I’m descended from any Xavier Pic, and who the hell he was I don’t know a thing about it, but I can tell you beyond the peradventure of a doubt, he was no nigger, and unfortunately that goes for Neil, too, though just now nothing would give me more pleasure, you young stinker, than to have you exposed as the blackest shine in Christendom, if it wasn’t that it dragged in all the rest of us, you hear me? But as for my family–-”

He was cut off by Neil’s young sister, Joan:

“Oh, for God’s sake, Uncle Emery, shut up about your family. They’re has-beens. You’re married, and Aunt Laura has got to stand for you. But what about me—what about me? Johnny will never marry me now, and he’ll bawl me out plenty for deceiving him about my race, and I never meant to, I never did!

“Oh, Neil, what made you do this to me? I’ve never hurt you, never! You’ve turned me into an outcast for my whole life, just to satisfy some silly idea of justice. Why? How could you deliberately make me queer like this, hiding from people all my life, never daring to have a friend, not one boy-friend, not my whole life now, when I was so happy with Johnny? Oh, why—how could you?”

But his sister Kitty Sayward, his loyal playmate all through childhood, was intent on him with unspoken horror that he should have destroyed her when she had loved him so.

He was frightened, ready to cry out that it had all been a maniac joke, when defense came from the still woman who was his mother.

They had been particularly tender of her, because she was so fragile and out of the common world. Her husband had been keeping a hand of affirmation and love on her shoulder, Joan had been smoothing her hair, Neil had peeped at her wretchedly. But she spoke more clearly than anyone else in the room. They stopped squabbling as she raised her hand, and so they got it full:

“Please! I think maybe Neil is right.”

The chorus was tremendous, but it ceased in agonized attention.

“I never could see why there is all this fuss about whether you’re ‘white’ or ‘black,’ so long as your folks love you, but you all seem to be so worried about it, so I must tell you.